Arugula is known across the Anglophone world as a fancy-pants kind of salad green (cf. ’08′s Arugulagate), but it isn’t known universally as “arugula.” In a British salad, the peppery plant would be called “rocket,” a name that seems designed by committee to appeal to veg-averse kids (“blast off to health!”) or custom-made for space-age farces (“Not that rocket, Bigglesby!”). But even if one sounds like fun and the other (ours) like you’re choking on a breadstick, they both come from the same Latin root, just mangled by different Romance languages along the way.

Our word, “arugula,” wasn’t all that commonly used in the U.S. until the 1980s, when it started catching on in trendy food circles. Before then, it was mostly used among Italian-Americans, who used the word “rucola” or “arugula” to refer to the plant, depending on what part of the Old Country they came from. Rucola is the Standard Italian word for the plant today, but the OED notes that the word in Calabria (the toe of the boot) is aruculu. Most Italian emigrants to the U.S. came from the South, bringing their dialects with them, so it makes sense that the calabrese term (or something similar) would be the one to filter into American English.

“Rocket,” on the other hand, came up to English from a northern Italian dialect word, ruchetta, which worked its way over the Alps and became the French roquette. Englishmen then did away with the poncy French “qu,” turned that feminine “ette” into a more utilitarian “et,” and ended up with “rocket.” This didn’t happen until the 16th century, though, as it took a while for arugula to make its way from the Mediterranean, where it had been grown since Roman times. And back in the day, those Romans called the plant eruca, and thought of it as a little bit of an aphrodisiac–Virgil once said it “excites the sexual desire of drowsy people.”

Eruca was also the Latin word for “caterpillar,” making arugula something like “the caterpillar plant.” Aphrodisiac jokes aside, this might seem a little odd (it tastes nothing like caterpillars!), unless you’ve actually tried to grow arugula in your garden–certain caterpillars called cabbage worms seem to love munching on the stuff, and given the sorry state of ancient pesticides, the connection would have been pretty clear to most Romans. If you feel like going even further back, eruca itself comes from a proto-Indo-European root (more on what that means at the History of Honey), ghers-, which meant “bristly” (and which is also the root of “horror”), but that has more to do with the caterpillar than the crunchy greens.